Terminator Salvation

Chances are you have no clue who Sam Worthington is, but come this time next year you won’t be able to get enough of him. Not only is he starring in James Cameron’s ten-years-in-the-making-industry-changing-superepic Avatar, but he’s also been cast as the lead in the too-cool-to-be-true remake of Clash of the Titans. And as if that wasn’t enough, rumour has it he’ll also be suiting up as the Green Lantern.

But before all that, Mr. Worthington will be appearing in Terminator Salvation as a new character named Marcus Wright.

And Marcus Wright looks like a pretty cool addition to the team. From the trailers we can gather that Wright is a Terminator who, for one reason or another, truly believes he’s a human being (and is rather unpleased when he learns otherwise). What’s more, Wright may or may not be jumping around through time on some kind of mission… but if he’s working for Skynet or a future John Connor or some third party is anybody’s guess.

From what I’ve seen, this character has a lot of potential. First off, his ambiguous identity (Is he a machine? Is he a human? Is he something else entirely?) gets to the heart of what the Terminator franchise is all about. It would be a shame if Salvation was simply humans good, robots bad. Wright, however, gives us the possibility for something in between. And if he is indeed a time traveler (and I think I may be jumping to conclusions on this one), well that’s just icing on the cake… but I’ll be talking about time paradoxes next week, so I won’t elaborate just yet.

Now in the interests of journalistic integrity (and surely I must have some…) I’ll admit that I haven’t seen a single movie that Worthington has been in (aside from Hart’s War, but I can’t for the life of me remember who he played), so I can’t really comment on his acting chops.

What I have seen, however, is Worthington’s ten-second appearance in the Terminator Salvation trailers. And from those ten seconds, I’ve compiled the top three reasons why Worthington belongs in this movie:

1. He nails the intentionally monotone robot performance

There’s a very fine line between acting that’s wooden and acting that’s supposed to be wooden. Worthington definitely falls into the latter category. I’m totally buying this guy as a robot that wants to be human. Sort of a killing machine Pinocchio, if you will.

2. Lots of intense man-screaming

Absolutely necessary for a “who am I?” performance. Also necessary for playing a role opposite Christian Bale. (You knew that joke was coming eventually…)

3. He’s not trying to be Schwarzenegger

This is an important one for me. As the first man to really step into Arnie’s very big shoes as resident robot badass, it would be easy for Worthington to offer up a poor imitation. And that would be disappointing. I don’t want to see the Diet Coke of Terminators (in fact, that was one of my problems with the TV show). But it looks like Worthington is doing his own thing and making this specific Terminator unique. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can never have too much diversity in your robot assassin arsenal.

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